Learning from Americans

So I have to thank Jason Haxton, the director of the museum in Kirksville, for welcoming me on my first trip to Andrew Taylor Still University (ATSU) in Kirksville, Missouri. I spent hours and hours reading the early literature and looking at documents from the founding campus of osteopathy and then contrasting that to all things that I had heard osteopathically while studying internationally. When I was in the UK I was working with European trained osteopaths but it was only during my time in the USA that I really started to think deeply about what it means to understand the application of principles on the treatment table, not simply speak about principles and then work in procedural techniques.

I remember gazing endlessly at Dr. Still’s treatment table, which is on display at the Museum, and it dawned on me how thin the legs were on that table and how lightly built the table was. I also recognized that the local people were large, strong, hearty folks. How would Dr. Still have moved patients around on that delicate table? Especially in his elder years, Dr. Still wasn’t likely thrusting patients around the table. He must have been doing different things! I also started to reflect on what type of person he was, how would he have viewed things? I looked not only at the written word but considered the unwritten word. I looked at his character, his lifestyle, and how he lived. Was he a pompous type academic or was he a common person? How did he view his surroundings? How did he interact with people? How did he use his language? How did he try to explain things? Why did he speak in stories? Why didn’t he speak in specific detail?

In his time Dr. Still was known to be one of the greatest functional anatomists in the world. What did he mean by ‘Anatomy being your first and your last lesson’? What did he mean by ‘Sleep with an anatomical text under your pillow’? All these things became another decade of inquiry for me as I tried to understand the character of the man and what he was trying to say to us. He was trying to give us the freedom to work with the principles correctly. Always recognizing that we could either be highly successful and understanding the application principles or be total failures. I think intrinsically, so A. T. Still became a Northern Star for me in the 2010’s. In my study of Dr. Still, I would never go looking for obscure articles or unknown documents that only few people see. Instead, I was reading his very commonly recognized and accessible texts and thinking deeply about them. It was all consuming.